Cormorant Books

Share |

The Queen of Unforgetting (Preview)

ONE

She prostrates herself before frye

April 1973

No month goes by that I don’t think of the big man who pulled me out of the lake when I was thirteen. Not that it’s become a ritual or anything; I don’t observe a minute of silence every fourth Sunday. But my brain has fixed a tiny shrine around the moment so I can always visit and worship. The essence of the moment: my body plunging out of the sun-saturated afternoon into the chill water. Down, down, as if there were no bottom. It was barely six feet deep, but I was only five-one. You don’t need much water to drown in. I was an inexperienced swimmer and I thought kicking my feet furiously would get me up and out. So why was I pulled down to the bottom like a lump of cement? I could hear the other kids playing above me, their voices an echo in a conch shell, while my feet thrashed wildly in the heavy water, producing no noise and no waves. I was locked in the lake’s embrace. My breath escaped me. Would my soul flee the vessel of my body? Was this how I was going to die?

I was too young to understand the concept; it didn’t occur to me that I might be mortal. A large hand grasped my arm and pulled me up. I must’ve gasped for air. I don’t remember the moment of new breath pulling into my lungs.

I hope I thanked him, the huge man who’d been horsing around with his son on the dock. At least six foot five. Wavy brown hair, stubbly beard. Later, when I asked who he was, some kid said they called him Tiny. He was a sports fisherman. What can I say about the irony? He fished me out of the drink like the catch of the day. No one else had noticed I was drowning. The day rolled on undisturbed, while I quietly sank to the bottom of the lake in my new flowered bathing suit. In two earth-shattering seconds, Tiny pulled me out of the foaming water and deposited me on the dock, a few short feet away. He smiled at me with big white teeth amid the dark beard. A mischievous smile. What did he mean by that smile? Don’t thank me, I would’ve done the same for a dog? Do something with your life now that you’ve got a second chance?

In some cultures if a person saves your life, he’s responsible for you forever. He must keep watch, feed you, protect you, as if by saving you in the first place he thwarted fate and must now take responsibility for his foolishness. It’s like that sign in the china shop: if you break it, it’s yours. He shirked his responsibility to me and the universe when he walked out of my life.

Maybe he could tell just by looking at me that I was going to have problems. Chubby little kid, always thinking too hard. Maybe his goofy smile on the dock said, Look, kid, I’ve done my bit.You’re not dead. Now it’s up to you. Thanks, Tiny.

Since that day at the lake, twelve years ago, I feel like I’ve had to pull myself out of the water by the scruff of the neck, over and over. And here I am. Not dead. I wonder if Tiny would approve of who I’ve become. It took more effort than I thought possible, but it was all worth it.

Because I am a scholar. I don’t say that lightly. With almost no help from anyone, I’ve worked hard to get where I am. And where I am is sitting across from the great Northrop Frye. World-renowned man of brilliance in our own little Victoria College. He’s still a man (though he’s what, now — sixty?). Before entering his office I released my blond wavy hair from its clasp. I catch his eyes straying through the steel-rimmed spectacles to the bit of cleavage winking above the V of my sweater while we discuss my thesis proposal. I’ve lost all my baby fat and to my own astonishment, have become — pardon the immodesty — a knockout. But no, he’s too old to be interested; it must be astigmatism. He’s made a career out of his genius. I don’t begrudge him that. You have to use what you’ve got. It’s all there is. He’s a soft-spoken, serious man in his vest and brown tweed, though not without some dry humour in his lectures, which he delivers deadpan. A halo of fine white hair emanates from his large skull, like ideas hovering.

He listens with attentive hooded eyes while I speak. I wish I could read his mind. Especially when I tell him what I want to base my thesis on: Brébeuf and His Brethren, a book-length poem about Jean de Brébeuf written by Frye’s own mentor, E.J. Pratt. I propose to demonstrate how the poem makes use of Brébeuf’s written account of his experiences among the Hurons in seventeenth-century Ontario. My emphasis will be on the motif of redemption.

I’ve chosen my topic with care, knowing Frye will be interested in Pratt’s work. It was Pratt, born in a Newfoundland fishing village, who recruited Frye to the University of Toronto, thus securing the great thinker his position for life — though Frye never actually earned a doctorate. This is what I want for myself: a place I can call home, a position. If I can convince Frye to supervise my thesis, I will almost certainly be offered a spot in that firmament.

The problem is the competition. Frye is a celebrated scholar and must be inundated with requests like mine. I’ve caught him at the tail end of his office hours on the day before an exam. Less chance of other students floating about. His office is plain for a great man, a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases behind him. Hills of books and student essays loom upon his rambling L-shaped desk. Only one adornment — a disquieting portrait hung on the wall to my left: a balding man with sad, pensive eyes, the features defined in thick strokes of brown.

“You’ve been very successful with William Blake,” Frye says coyly.

I’ve been waiting for this turn in the conversation. During the winter, the college announced that my essay had beaten out all the other master’s students to win the William Blake Award. Prestigious, with a little cash on the side, it was a competition for the best essay on the poet. The chairman of the award, a desiccated professor named Garrick, presented me with a cheque in his tiny office in a corner of Old Vic. I’ll never understand the alumni who fund these things. I can’t imagine having that much money to spare. At least people sat up and took notice when I won. It gave me the nerve to approach Frye.

“I thought you might continue with him.”

I won’t tell him I’m sick to death of Blake and his winged angels. Frye wrote the seminal book on the “mad poet.” Instead, I say “Blake will never want for scholars. I’d like to work on something closer to home. A Canadian poet with a Canadian story.”

He nods and I’m encouraged to go on.

I explain my plan to research the Jesuit Relations, the journals the French Jesuits kept over the forty years they ministered in North America. Also Francis Parkman’s enthusiastic biography of the Black Robes, with special fawning over Brébeuf. But Frye has read everything ever written, like a giant indiscriminate brain, and is too polite to admit familiarity with my material. He watches me intently as I rattle on about my research.

“Some critics see the poem as anti-Christian,” I say, “and write about Pratt’s sense of irony. They say he was repelled by the mission among the Hurons, and that he wrote a satire. I strongly disagree.”

Frye listens politely. I continue.

“There’s not a whit of irony in the whole poem. Rather it’s reverent. I think those critics are projecting their own aversion for the Jesuits onto Pratt. From what I’ve heard, he was a generous, unpretentious man ...”

I wait for confirmation from one who knew him well. None comes.

“... who brought to life a heroic period in our history. With great compassion. I take the poem at face value. And I’ll discuss the imagery throughout, especially the role of fire and the cross.” Frye spends a good deal of lecture time expounding on religious symbolism.

His expression hasn’t changed but I note a tiny arch of one eyebrow. He’s too private a man to jump in with an anecdote on Pratt or even acknowledge their relationship. They were both United Church ministers, for heaven’s sake. Perhaps I’ve presumed too much in coming here.

“Your project has much merit,” he says, shifting slightly in his chair. “Your topic might be more in Dr. Watt’s area of expertise. You know Dr. Watt?”

Yes, I know Dr. Watt and he’s not Frye. I sit chastened by my own thoughts — the folly of assuming The Great Man would take on a lowly grad student he barely knows. Maybe I should’ve stuck to Blake. Despite my presence in Frye’s classes, I find it hard to speak up. I am happy to roll back my skirt to reveal a crossed leg at my desk, but loath to voice ideas that might expose what lies within. I gather up my nerve.

“Have you been to the reconstructed fort, Sainte-Marie, near Midland?”

He nods, patiently. He probably knows its history, but allows me to wax eloquent about the timbered structures rebuilt according to old drawings and archaeological findings. I describe the smell of woodsmoke hanging in the air, my main memory of the place. The people wandering the site in period costume, chopping wood, baking bread, as if they were in a time warp and Brébeuf himself might step out of the chapel at any moment in his long, black cloak, large crucifix around his neck.

“He was a very tall man,” I say.

“Yes, Miss Montrose. A giant, for his day.”

Frye surprises me by using my name. Why shouldn’t he know my name? I’m the most attractive woman in his classes — grad students tend to be mousey. Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of my long legs and my curtain of hair, but they’re a backdrop for my real life, which goes on inside my head.

I’m intent on convincing him of the merit of my thesis, so I keep at it. He’s too polite to cut me off. Perhaps he will tell his wife tonight that a pretty but boring young student kept him from coming home earlier.

“Frankly, I was hoping ... because of your connection to Dr. Pratt, I might get some deeper insight into his poetry.”

“I can discuss his work with you, but I wouldn’t want to encroach on your own ideas.” He speaks in a monotone and whatever he says sounds as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I can give you copies of the essays I’ve written about him.”

I’ve lost the battle. Because that’s what it was. I can see my future drifting away down a river. It’s lodged in a brittle wooden box approaching the rapids. I know I’m in a crisis when my brain turns to water imagery.

“If you don’t mind,” I say, defeated, “you knew him personally. What was he like? I picture him as a very serious man. All that Newfoundland angst.”

Finally, a hint of a smile around his lips. “No, no. Not serious at all. Very gregarious, in fact. An exuberant teller of stories. And jokes.”

“I’m astounded! The sea poems, the tragedy of the fishermen — from what wellspring did he write those?”

“He was a complicated man.”

“Those poems ... People drowning in the dark, the terrible sadness. I always remember the opening of ‘The Drowning’:

The rust of hours,
Through a year of days,
Has dulled the edge of the pain;
But at night
A wheel in my sleep
Grinds it smooth and keen.”

I feel an inexplicable well of tears rising in me, the picture of my young body standing on the bottom of the lake in the new flowered bathing suit, the air expelling from my lungs. “I nearly drowned once ... and ever since, I find it hard ...”

I feel my face grow hot. Why did I tell him that? I can’t look at him. Of all people, he’s the last person who needs to know anything about my personal life. How did I get here, into this chair opposite the man they call Buddha? Ah yes. Now I remember. I am the queen of cobbling together disparate pieces of debris to manufacture a unified whole. Here is the aimless flotsam I wove together:

the fact that I developed an instant fascination when I read about Brébeuf in grade school;
the fact that Pratt wrote an epic poem about my hero;
the fact that Pratt was a dear friend of Frye’s;
the fact that I want Frye to supervise my thesis;
the fact that Brébeuf was a giant in his time and could
easily have plucked me out of the lake.

All right, the last point is a kind of subheading of the first. But if you draw them all on the same page, they become a map. I was hoping the map would guide me to my future, but it suddenly seems archaic, like the names written there. I am about to rise, demolished, from my chair, when The Great Man clears his throat. “Well, Miss Montrose, write up your proposal and drop it in my box. Come back in three weeks. We can discuss it then.” His impenetrable eyes look tired; I have worn him down.

I feel my mouth fall open, with no sound emitting. “Thank you,” I croak, and steal away before I can say something that changes his mind.

TWO

tyger! tyger!

I float down the hall in the arms of a benevolent universe. Did the venerable old sage really agree to take me on? No, he’s considering it. The best I could have expected. Write up your proposal and drop it in my box. Come back in three weeks. We’ll discuss it then. He’s given himself some wiggle room. I can’t blame him. He doesn’t know what I’m capable of. It’s all I could have hoped for from an academic idol.

A dozen years earlier another student of Frye’s, Margaret Atwood, must have glided down this same hall after she’d won the E.J. Pratt Medal for her poetry. Okay, no comparison. But with a good imagination you can see where I might be headed. She’s made a name for herself I envy — a Governor General’s Award for more poetry, two novels given the star treatment. And just last year she made a splash with a book that analyzes Canadian literature. A startling book, really. The title says it all: Survival. I can relate to that. For CanLit it’s the struggle against geography, for me it’s the struggle against myself. Yes, you say, everyone has that. But it’s not a moot point: my two selves might annihilate each other. Stop dramatizing? Wait till you know me better. I might surprise you.

I head out the door, wondering if Margaret had any misgivings along the way. I’ve seen her now and then at Vic, a slip of a woman you wouldn’t notice in a crowd. With her mass of curly dark hair and puckish expression, she could’ve been fashioned out of Frye’s rib. She must be visiting her mentors — not only Frye, but also Jay Macpherson, a poet turned prof who herself was a student of Frye’s. This is the charmed circle I’m trying to join.

The rain has stopped when I emerge from the New Academic Building, the boxy minimalist addition to Victoria College.The sodden grounds between the buildings, the empty, black flower beds, smell heavy with spring. An hour ago I hadn’t noticed, but the air has changed: it’s ripe with promise.

I wait for a break between the cars to cross the street into Queen’s Park. Old maples and oaks grow stolidly throughout the park, their trunks thick with years. Marching along one of the asphalt paths, I peer up. Black branches reach into the sky, quivering with life again. In a few weeks the buds will erupt. By then I will be in the throes of anxious expectation, waiting to hear from The Great Man about my proposal.

Fifteen years ago Frye produced Anatomy of Criticism, considered one of the most important works of literary theory of the twentieth century. It drew all of Western literature into a coherent pattern, with a comprehensive map of characters, plots, themes, and metaphors. Literature, he claimed, evolved from mythology and he took it upon himself to provide a systematic framework of the myths we live by. I’ve learned a lot from him, but I’m not sure which myth I’m living by. I wish I knew how to ask him.

I must get home now and gather my thoughts and notes together to write the proposal.

My train of thought is derailed. Behind me in the park, the whoosh of fabric against fabric. I turn. Hugh hovers in the waning light. Hugh. You had to expel a mouthful of air to say it. Could be mistaken for a sneeze. The name and the man.

“Are you following me?” I have no patience for the tall scrawny figure still sporting a winter jacket. Not enough meat on him to keep him warm. I need a man of substance with a barrel chest and muscular thighs.

“I’ve been trying to call you.” He speaks through his turned-up nose, affecting his usual English accent. I imagine him practising at home. His pale skin reddens as he steps toward me. I hate blushing in a man. It’s undignified. So are the stooped shoulders and the nothing chest his pea jacket can’t disguise. “You’re hard to get hold of.”

I’ve trained my roommate to take messages, which I don’t return. “I’ve been busy.”

“Term’s over now. You’ll have more time.”

Yes, that was my excuse for the past month. I squint at him, trying to recall what I ever found appealing. I was attracted to him for about a minute when he was a teaching assistant in my Blake seminar. It must have been his breadth of knowledge, his intellectual pretensions, which don’t allow him to get a decent haircut. Splinters of brown hair fall over his ears when he looks down. Since he’s in a constant state of embarrassment, he’s always looking down. He may be brilliant, but he’s socially inept. “I just want to talk to you. Can we go somewhere for coffee?”

“I have to get home.”

“Mel, what happened to us?” His grey eyes peer at me behind the wire-rimmed spectacles that give him that indigent poet look.

“You don’t call me anymore. You ignore me in the hall ... I thought we had something.”

I knew from the start I’d be sorry. “Look, Hugh, things don’t always work out.”

His thin lips form a line as the scholar’s brain dissects my words. He doesn’t appear convinced. I’m not averse to lying to get him off my back.

“Anyway, I’ve met someone.”

His face darkens. His pupils turn into pinpricks. “It’s not that simple, Mel. I put my career on the line for you. We broke the rules.”

I was hoping he wouldn’t stoop to playing the guilt card. He contemplates my poker face. “Well, no one will ever know,” I say.

“That depends.”

Hughie, Hughie, you can’t threaten me. “If you tell anyone, you’ll be in just as much trouble.”

His lips move like worms. “It’ll be worse for you.”

Men are so childish. Would he cut off his nose to spite his face? Okay, he put himself out for me. A lot. But how long should I be beholden to him? He got his reward — payment in full.

“Look, Hugh, you’ve got a promising career ahead of you.” I will spell it out for him, since he obviously has no imagination of his own. “I can see you ten years from now, Professor Hugh Woodley, the upcoming authority on William Blake. All those nubile young women in your class, hanging on your every word. At least one of them will find you irresistible and you’ll marry her and have two kids, a boy and a girl. So don’t screw it up.”

He’s staring at me, not listening at all. “It’s you I want.”

“You’ll have to stand in line.” I turn to keep walking through the park.

He jumps in front of me with unexpected energy and grabs my arm. “Remember when we were ... together? I called you Rowena?”

That’s what I get for consorting with an English major. Frye lectured on the nineteenth-century convention of using two heroines, one dark, one light; Ivanhoe was a prime example. Hugh has mistaken me for the light heroine, the blond Rowena, as opposed to the dark Jewess, Rebecca. Which proves how little he knows about me. And he is no Ivanhoe, which I am about to retort when he stops me cold.

“Marry me!”

I pull my arm away and blink at him. My first marriage proposal. “I’m flattered,” I say, lying. “I’m not planning to get married.” Not to him, at any rate.

“I’d do anything for you.”

“Then let me go home. I’ve got things to do.” His storm cloud eyes study my face as if he will find an answer in my skin. Maybe he thinks there’s still hope. In case he does, I add, “You know that girl who sits beside me in your seminar? Jan something? I’ve seen her looking at you. You should ask her out.”

I try to step around him, but he grabs my arm again, tighter this time. A side of him I didn’t expect. Should I be scared? “I don’t want anyone else! Stop and listen to me! I can help you with your thesis. I’m not going to use all the research I spent years gathering. You can have it!”

His thin lips quiver with magnanimity. He has no idea that what he’s offering is completely useless to me. I’ve kept my cards close to the chest about my thesis topic — he doesn’t know about Brébeuf. He thinks I’m going to do a comparison of Pratt and Blake. Now I wonder where he got an idea like that.

“I’ll sleep on it,” I say, desperate to get away from him.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

His pallid eyes remind me of the winter that’s just passed. I wrench my arm from his grip.

“Remember what I said.”

I march away, eyes front, his stationary figure in my periphery vision. My breath comes in short spurts as I head toward Hoskin Avenue on the other side of the park. His eyes are burning my back.

The park sits in the middle of Queen’s Park Crescent like a boulder in a river. The traffic flows smoothly, like water, around the impediment of the park, forced around it on either side, only to rejoin below. The cars on the west side speed south from Bloor Street, with only the obstacle of the park to slow them down; those driving east along Hoskin try to avoid the current of the southbound lane. I must wait for a break in traffic if I value my life. And I must say that today I do. Things are definitely looking up, in spite of Hugh.

I reach St. George Street, massaging my arm. Twilight has descended. When I turn my head, searching the sidewalk just to make sure, Hugh is gone.

In my flat on Madison Avenue, I sit at my desk by the large window, pen in hand. For inspiration, I have put Pratt’s picture in front of me, the one on the frontispiece of his collection of poems. He stares into a space above the camera, eyes dreamlike, otherworldly. You know the type: the person, no matter how humble in appearance, gathers importance from the dramatic pose. Do photographers tell their subjects, Look off as if you can see eternity? As if you’re solving the problems of the world? His picture looks like that, with his wisp of a smile, fleshy cheek resting on his palm: Pratt contemplating eternity.

Frye wrote the introduction to Pratt’s book of poems with a touching fondness, calling him Ned. I think of Ned and Norrie sitting in a leathery den in the fifties, discussing William Blake. Frye’s first book was Fearful Symmetry, a study of Blake, the title from the poem every English major can recite in her sleep:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I hear them compare “The Tyger” to Blake’s companion poem, “The Lamb.” They discuss the former as the beast within oneself, the dark shadow of the human soul. The lamb all grown up. They see a place in the divine plan for both the lamb and the tiger, a balance of innocence and experience.

My typewriter is sleeping under its vinyl cover. I stare out at the street lamp. Should I mention, as background in my proposal, how the ingenious Pratt raised money for his way to Toronto? It must’ve been expensive to travel from Newfoundland. He concocted a — what would you call it? — an elixir for the local fishermen out of cherry bark, spruce, sarsaparilla, and a strong lacing of rum. This antidote to everything sold well. Maybe it helped them forget they risked their lives every time they set foot in their boats. Maybe the cod struggling in the nets didn’t remind them of their own death. Pratt made enough money from the potion to support himself that first year. Would Frye appreciate my digging up that little tidbit?

Perhaps I should stick to Pratt as the tragic poet of the sea. He fell into the topic, so to speak. His grandfather was a sea captain, his father a minister who had to break the news to relatives that their husbands or only sons had drowned.

No, no. Get away from the damned water! It’s just a coincidence. The poet I chose to study for his portrayal of Brébeuf also happened to write about the sea. A coincidence? I don’t believe in fate, though apparently Pratt did. In a poem he wrote about the Titanic, the ship and the iceberg are predestined to meet. He said God didn’t ordain tragedy, but permitted it. That as a child he’d been brought up to believe in the goodness of God and yet had to reconcile tragedy with it. He was always under that shadow. Yes — all that fits into Brébeuf. Hell, it fits into everything. But I don’t need to solve the problems of the world. Just the poem.

I see the bloody thing in my sleep:
And in Bayeux a neophyte while rapt
In contemplation saw a bleeding form
Falling beneath the instrument of death ...
The fingers of Brébeuf were at his breast,
Closing and tightening on a crucifix,
While voices spoke aloud unto his ear
And to his heart — per ignem et per aquam.

Through fire and through water. Perfect. Fire for Brébeuf and water for me.

Pratt was a straightforward writer; some criticize him for his simplicity, some commend him for it. He pits the aristocratic Brébeuf as Christian hero struggling against the barbaric Indian villain. Nice and simple. And connects all this with a theme he likes to explore in his poetry — the temple and the cave, the struggle between the civilized and the primitive in the world, the relation between reason and instinct. I, too, am interested in this struggle. It happens to be central in my life.